Jim Louderback and I attended The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference this week. Jim left Tuesday to attend the Future in Review conference, while I stuck around for the second day of "D," hosted by the Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

The conference actually started Sunday night with a discussion with Apple's Steve Jobs, who showed Podcasting and Apple's Tiger operating system. But he also set the tone for much of the discussion at the conference by talking about how technology vendors have to "pass through the orifices" of the major wireless carriers in order to get their technology to consumers on mobile phones.

This theme was picked up by many of the speakers over the next few days, with some such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and Motorola's Ed Zander talking about good relations with the carriers, and others talking about the difficulty in dealing with them.

Tuesday's sessions began with a discussion of the role of traditional media in a world of blogs with two panels that were, for the most part, surprisingly restrained.

Six Apart's Mena Trott, Dan Gillmor of Grassroots Media (and formerly a reporter for the old-media San Jose Mercury News) and Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox started out by explaining the world of blogs and new emerging news sources.

The panelists picked up on the theme of the "long tail," talking about how there are more sources for information available than ever, and about how blogging has led to a proliferation of voices.

But there was widespread agreement with Gillmor's claim that these new forms are not a replacement for traditional media. "It's not blogging versus journalism," Gillmor said. "Blogging is just a part of journalism." He added that blogging is merely another tool and that it would be a tragedy if traditional journalism were to become extinct.

Several members of the panel took offense at a suggestion from the audience that bloggers don't take the truth seriously, and they responded by pointing to errors in the mainstream press.

This was followed by a panel of people who ran major media companies: Peter Kahn of Dow Jones (which publishes The Wall Street Journal), Don Graham of The Washington Post Co., and Tony Ridder of Knight Ridder. Again the panel was quite open to new media as well, with Don Graham likening the bloggers to Ben Franklin, who had a unique voice without a big media company behind him.

Much of that panel was devoted to a discussion of how print readership of newspapers seems to be declining while overall readership, led by online, is increasing. Tony Ridder explained how many of the Knight Ridder papers are using blogging as a tool to expand their coverage.

In another session, Barry Diller of IAC/Interactive Corp. said "content wins out" and talked about the important of editors in directing customers to the best content. He said the barriers to distributing content are falling and that now should be a good time for independent content producers.

Diller also discussed his recent purchase of Ask Jeeves and his continued belief in the growth of e-commerce, including a renewed look at real estate.

Mossberg grilled new Intel CEO Paul Otellini on security issues affecting standard PC hardware, and Otellini responded by talking about the company's initiatives in the area. In particular, he said the company is focusing on isolation, hardening and recovery. He also talked about Intel's backing of the digital home and of wireless computing, particularly WiMax.

Peter Hirschberg of the Computer History Museum gave a fascinating and funny talk on the history of computer marketing going back to the Univac machine used to predict election results in 1952.

Susan Whiting of Nielsen Media Research talked about trends in television viewing, and how while most people receive many channels, they typically watch only about 15 of them, although each family has its own favorites. She said the average family watches more than eight hours of television per day.

The conference ended with Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang talking about the 10 years of Yahoo, and its relationships with Netscape and Google. Filo made a point of talking about how Yahoo switched search providers a number of times during its existence, and how its focus was always on integrating search with its own content, starting with its directory.

Yang talked about the stages of finding information, going from primarily a directory in the beginning to the predominance of algorithmic search, and now to more personalized, relevant results.

He also talked about Yahoo's investments in local content, music and other content.

The Products:

Tuesday's sessions saw a number of demonstrations of new products or product ideas.

Hewlett-Packard led off by showing a coffee table with a touchscreen computer underneath a glass panel in the center, with an interface designed for viewing photos, playing music, playing games, etc. This was just a concept, the company said.

But on the product side, HP showed its microdisplay TV, based on DLP (digital light processing) technology, which it said it would ship this fall. The company said the TV is notable for making connections to multiple devices easier, such as plugs under a cover in the front, and a UI that lets you visually see and choose all of your content whether it's coming from cable, satellite, broadcast, DVD, gaming machine or computer.

Hillcrest showed a demonstration of a new UI for controlling media from across the room, using a round remote control called a "loop."

Pure Digital showed a one-time-use digital camcorder it expects to have in stores this fall for less than $30. When a customer returns the product to the store, they get a DVD, which they can view and also use to see individual clips or send videos to friends and relatives. It looks like it could dramatically increase the usage of digital video.

Finally, during his presentation, Intel's Otellini demonstrated a number of new designs, including a Chinese desktop designed to run in two modesone as a locked-down education machine with parental controls; the other as a normal Windows machine.

He also showed prototypes of a machine designed for Chinese Internet cafes, a very thin desktop based on mobile components, a handheld machine that looked like a larger version of the PSP, and a PDA with a full keyboard. He said Intel showed these designs to its OEMs but couldn't commit to them actually being marketed.

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